Two startups changing the live-music industry are beginning a $16 million merger

Songkick Founder and CEO Ian Hogarth attends Spotify knocks it out of the park at Stephen Weiss Studio on November 30, 2011 in New York City.
Charles Eshelman/Getty Images
Two of the technology startups trying to shake up the live music and ticketing market - Songkick and CrowdSurge - are merging.

The new company will keep the Songkick brand, with the merger accompanied by a $16m funding round from venture capital firms Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Access Ventures - the latter also owns major label Warner Music Group, and is a major investor in streaming music service Deezer.

New Songkick will continue old Songkick's service that maintains a database of live-music concerts, and notifies fans of artists when new gigs are announced and tickets go on sale. In recent years, the company has also started selling tickets in the UK.

CrowdSurge, meanwhile, has built a business around helping musicians sell tickets directly to their fans, with more than 500 clients including Paul McCartney, Ellie Goulding, Childish Gambino, John Legend and Kenny Chesney.

"The combined company will help artists sell more tickets directly to their fans and fix the central problem at the heart of the concert industry - that 50% of tickets go unsold," claimed Songkick in a blog post as the merger was announced.

The company claims to have 10 million unique visitors to its website and app every month - a number that has not increased since May 2014 - while the new entity claims to have sold tickets to more than 10,000 events a year.

According to Hogarth, combining forces will help Songkick expand its ticketing business into the US, where many venues have exclusive deals with large ticketing providers like Ticketmaster - a subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment - but where CrowdSurge has found a way in through the "artist allocations" of tickets assigned for artists to sell directly to fans.

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"We faced the question at Songkick of whether we were going to spend the next three years replicating everything CrowdSurge had done, or whether we were going to join forces. It made so much sense to come together," said Hogarth.